In this social and cultural history of Czechoslovakia's "gentle revolution," James Krapfl shifts the focus away from elites to ordinary citizens who endeavored-from the outbreak of revolution in 1989 ...to the demise of the Czechoslovak federation in 1992-to establish a new, democratic political culture. Unique in its balanced coverage of developments in both Czech and Slovak lands, including the Hungarian minority of southern Slovakia, this book looks beyond Prague and Bratislava to collective action in small towns, provincial factories, and collective farms.
Through his broad and deep analysis of workers' declarations, student bulletins, newspapers, film footage, and the proceedings of local administrative bodies, Krapfl contends that Czechoslovaks rejected Communism not because it was socialist, but because it was arbitrarily bureaucratic and inhumane. The restoration of a basic "humanness"-in politics and in daily relations among citizens-was the central goal of the revolution. In the strikes and demonstrations that began in the last weeks of 1989, Krapfl argues, citizens forged new symbols and a new symbolic system to reflect the humane, democratic, and nonviolent community they sought to create. Tracing the course of the revolution from early, idealistic euphoria through turns to radicalism and ultimately subversive reaction,Revolution with a Human Facefinds in Czechoslovakia's experiences lessons of both inspiration and caution for people in other countries striving to democratize their governments.
An important problem faced by colleges and universities, that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions, is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the ...aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation. This article shows how discontinuities in an East Coast college's aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions. Semiparametric estimates based on a regression-discontinuity (RD) approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students.
Scholarly interpretations of the collapse of communism and developments thereafter have tended to be primarily concerned with people’s need to rid themselves of the communist system, of their past. ...The expectations, dreams, and hopes that ordinary Eastern Europeans had when they took to the streets in 1989, and have had ever since, have therefore been overlooked – and our understanding of the changes in post-communist Europe has remained incomplete. Focusing primarily on five key areas, such as the heritage of 1989 revolutions, ambivalence, disillusionment, individualism, and collective identities, this book explores the expectations and goals that ordinary Eastern Europeans had during the 1989 revolutions and the decade thereafter, and also the problems and disappointments they encountered in the course of the transformation. The analysis is based on extensive interviews with university students and young intellectuals in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Estonia in the 1990s, which in themselves have considerable value as historical documents.
I discuss the short-run dynamics of commodity prices, production, and inventories, as well as the sources and effects of market volatility. I explain how prices, rates of production, and inventory ...levels are interrelated, and are determined via equilibrium in two interconnected markets: a cash market f or spot purchases and sales of the commodity, and a market for storage. I show how equilibrium in these markets affects and is affected by changes in the level of price volatility. I also explain the role and behavior of commodity futures markets, and the relationship between spot prices, futures prices, and inventory behavior. I illustrate these ideas with data for the petroleum complex - crude oil, heating oil, and gasoline - over the past two decades.
We examine the role of the target firm's independent outside directors during takeover attempts by tender offer. We find that when the target's board is independent, the initial tender offer premium, ...the bid premium revision, and the target shareholder gains over the entire tender offer period are higher, and that the presence of a poison pill and takeover resistance lead to greater premiums and shareholder gains. We conclude that independent outside directors enhance target shareholder gains from tender offers, and that boards with a majority of independent directors are more likely to use resistance strategies to enhance shareholder wealth.
This paper develops new econometric methods to infer hospital quality in a model with discrete dependent variables and nonrandom selection. Mortality rates in patient discharge records are widely ...used to infer hospital quality. However, hospital admission is not random and some hospitals may attract patients with greater unobserved severity of illness than others. In this situation the assumption of random admission leads to spurious inference about hospital quality. This study controls for hospital selection using a model in which distance between the patient's residence and alternative hospitals are key exogenous variables. Bayesian inference in this model is feasible using a Markov chain Monte Carlo posterior simulator, and attaches posterior probabilities to quality comparisons between individual hospitals and groups of hospitals. The study uses data on 74,848 Medicare patients admitted to 114 hospitals in Los Angeles County from 1989 through 1992 with a diagnosis of pneumonia. It finds the smallest and largest hospitals to be of the highest quality. There is strong evidence of dependence between the unobserved severity of illness and the assignment of patients to hospitals, whereby patients with a high unobserved severity of illness are disproportionately admitted to high quality hospitals. Consequently a conventional probit model leads to inferences about quality that are markedly different from those in this study's selection model.
Price limit advocates claim that price limits decrease stock price volatility, counter overreaction, and do not interfere with trading activity. Conversely, price limit critics claim that price ...limits cause higher volatility levels on subsequent days (volatility spillover hypothesis), prevent prices from efficiently reaching their equilibrium level (delayed price discovery hypothesis), and interfere with trading due to limitations imposed by price limits (trading interference hypothesis). Empirical research does not provide conclusive support for either positions. We examine the Tokyo Stock Exchange price limit system to test these hypotheses. Our evidence supports all three hypotheses suggesting that price limits may be ineffective.
Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate deforestation. To explore this tradeoff, this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use and estimates probabilities of ...alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics and distance to market using a multinomial logit specification of this model. Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road placement. The model is applied to data for southern Belize, an area experiencing rapid expansion of both subsistence and commercial agriculture, using geographic information system (GIS) techniques to select sample points at 1-kilometer intervals. Market access, land quality, and tenure status affect the probability of agricultural land use synergistically, having differential effects on the likelihood of commercial versus semisubsistence farming. The results suggest that road building in areas with agriculturally poor soils and low population densities may be a “lose-lose” proposition, causing habitat fragmentation and providing low economic returns.
This paper compares the timeliness and accuracy of (confidential) government assessments of bank condition against market evaluations of large U.S. bank holding companies. We find that supervisors ...and bond rating agencies both acquire some information that would help the other group forecast changes in bank condition. In contrast, supervisory assessments and equity market indicators are not strongly interrelated. Furthermore, supervisory assessments are generally less accurate than either stock or bond market indicators in predicting future changes in performance, except when those assessments derive from a recent on-site inspection visit. To some extent, these findings are consistent with the various parties' differing incentives.
This study examines whether higher state cigarette taxes can be used to improve birth outcomes. Data on the outcomes of interest are taken from the 1989–1992 Natality Detail files, generating a ...sample of roughly 10.5 million births. The results suggest that smoking participation among pregnant women declines and average birth weights rise when excise taxes are increased. These results can be used to form an instrumental variables estimate of the impact of smoking on birth weight. This estimate is remarkably close to numbers from a random assignment clinical trial. The smoking participation price elasticity is estimated to be −0.5.
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